Selves

At the beginning of a lesson with Year 12 a boy greeted me with, “Can I ask you a rhetorical question, Miss?” I replied that he could but said that naturally he wouldn’t expect an answer. He nodded and looked at me. I looked back at him, waiting for the question. It didn’t come. Finally, with a smirk he said, “That was it. That was the question.”

Questions are funny things. This week my son-in-law, working as a locum in the A&E department of a Belfast hospital, tended a patient who had a nasty cut on his chin. He was rather the worse for wear (the patient, not the doctor) and Sam was trying to engage him in conversation as he carefully stitched the wound. After giving a few grunted replies the patient felt he should at least try to enter into the dialogue and asked Sam, “So, what do you do yourself then?”

In church on Sunday, our pastor told a story about the actor, Kirk Douglas, who apparently enjoyed giving lifts to hitchhikers. One such traveller, recognising the driver as someone famous blurted out, “Do you know who you are?”

Often we know the answer to our questions, but we’re making conversation and exploring our own and other people’s thoughts and opinions. Like the inner child we haven’t quite outgrown, we are always asking “Why?” I have lots of questions - most of them, it has to be said, for God. As I get older there are more and more imponderables and fewer easy answers. When I was a university student I knew a lot more, or thought I did, than I do now. I was a passionate evangelist and loved the certainty of religious conviction. Nowadays, God seems inscrutable and mysterious. Less sure, I still love the adventure of faith, the listening and the hoping and the wondering and the waiting.

Jesus liked to ask questions. Picture the scene: a blind beggar sits by the side of the road, desperate and needy and Jesus says, "What do you want me to do?" Wasn’t it obvious? Isn’t it still? I know there are times when I’m looking for direction and God says, "What do you want?" The will to choose and decide is a precious gift which is ours to exercise every day.

I may have mentioned GM Hopkins before. I love how the poetic agonies over his faith are infused with an irrepressible joy in God’s creation. He asks the big questions but doesn’t lose heart when he cannot arrive at a definitive answer. Hopkins believed in ‘inscape’ - that everything has an essential ‘isness’ - a self which screams out a singular aspect of its Creator.

Even trees, or especially trees. In Binsey Poplars, He laments the wanton felling of a row of aspens and lambasts those who ‘hack and rack the growing green’. Their loss is described as a death and a travesty for generations to come. There is an implied suffering as the destructive strokes ‘unselve’ the beautiful scene. By destroying nature we attack its very essence, and with it impoverish our own selves. Could it be that like the flowers and birds our only purpose is to reflect the glory of I AM? Every petal and feather, like every person, is a tiny piece of God. That’s who he is or at least that’s how we can catch glimpses of a little bit of who he is. He is so vast and we are so small that we can only understand if he draws us pictures, like a parent with a palette. In As Kingfishers Catch Fire Hopkins can hear creation cry “What I do is me: for that I came.” The Forestry Commission would do well to think on that as they rush through the sale of tracts of woodland without any safeguards.

It’s not as we worry or question or debate things to death that we understand, but as we are quiet and soak in the beauty of the Creator as reflected in created things that we know, find a self and are known. And that has to be answer enough, for now.

"Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."